Hi Eric,

>I wrote:
>> It was "Williams Tube" memory.  It did need to be refreshed, and did not
>> acchieve tremendous density.  It also was not terribly reliable.  It is
>> rumored that the first video games were played on these; kinda neat having
>> the frame buffer and display in the same device.
>
>myke predko <myke@PASSPORT.CA> replied:
>> I think if you look back at the old computer games, you'll see that the
>> screen buffer is used for both video memory and program memory.  This also
>
>I'm not sure, but I think you may have missed the point.  I wasn't talking
>about the frame buffer being part of main memory, or vice versa.  That is
>very common.  There have even been some x86 PCs that do that, but AFAIK only
>the Cyrix MediaGX based PCs do it now.

I guess I did miss your point - I was reacting to the "first video games"
comment.

How are the values sensed?  I'm thinking of something like an analog storage
scope screen, with a unique segment for each of the "pixels" (for lack of a
better term).

>What the original poster and I referred to was a device in which the
>computer's main memory literally was the display tube.  The use as a frame
>buffer was completely incidental.

As to the original program, finding the largest prime factor of 2 ^ 18 - 1,
I just came up with 73 (the factors are 3 (3x), 7, 18, 93).

myke

"I was well aware that the processes of puberty are often fatal to psychic
power."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle